WORDS AND PHOTOS BY DAN BAINBRIDGE
I’ve been traveling for almost nine months now. Seven of those months were spent traveling alone through Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Bangladesh, India, and Nepal.
The past two months, I’ve been with a friend from back home, Tommy, exploring Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and now Kyrgyzstan. I’m slowly making my way west.
I’d say one of the biggest differences between traveling alone and with a friend is that I’m less inclined to socialize and meet new people when I’m with someone I know.
There’s less to fall back on, because I’ll always have someone to hang out with. It’s really a great thing to be able to do what I was doing everyday but be with someone who understands me, my sense of humor, things I like and dislike, etc.
It’s comforting. It makes my decisions more clear and it’s overall more enjoyable, in the moment. But in the end, I will always prefer traveling alone.
Traveling alone is an entirely different experience. You have to wake up and do everything yourself — find something to eat, a place to sleep, people to photograph, something to do.
Anything, really. It’s exhausting. If you’re lonely or depressed and you want to find people to hang out with, you have to do that yourself. It’s kind of like moving to a new city, but you’re in a different city every few days.
It helps that a lot of the things you do while traveling don’t really carry that much weight, so you tend to feel more confident.
But it’s also scary—especially when you’re in a country with a completely different culture. People from different backgrounds have different senses of humor and different expectations for how you should act.
Socializing as a solo traveler in a foreign country can be a complex thing to navigate. But it is very fulfilling.
Meeting someone you truly connect with — someone from a completely different culture and background — is an indescribable experience.
When you’re around people, or even just in a place that expects you to act a certain way, you’ll almost always fall into that role.
When you’re alone in a new place is one of the only instances where you can truly be yourself. Not only this, but you’re constantly challenging yourself by going to a new place that’s uncomfortable or foreign to you.
If you approach these new environments with the intention of finding something positive or interesting, and actually succeed in doing so (anything can be interesting depending on how you look at it), doing this action over and over again literally wires your brain to constantly be challenging yourself and trying new things.
You will train yourself to be more curious and interested. There exists a rare, profound level of mental and emotional growth by traveling to completely foreign places alone; something that traveling with a friend could not provide.
Words and photos by Dan Bainbridge. If reposting, please credit @dgbainbridge on Instagram.